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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Monday, December 16, 1968
Remember the 'Forgotten Ones'
What will become of the "forgotten ones?"
Will the American Indian be kept apart from the American society by the reservation system and the poor quality of elementary and high school education the Bureau of Indian Affairs affords? Or will he someday be assimilated so completely into the norm of American life that not a trace will remain of a proud and fascinating heritage?
Which way is best and is there a possible median? Or more explicitly, can a minority in the United States retain its cultural entity and still enjoy the benefits of being American?
These are thorny questionsbut they are questions that the United States must begin facing.
The late Robert F. Kennedy called the Indian "the forgotten Americans," and his label was a precise description of the status of the first Americans.
For since the last threat of Indian wars were squelched in the Old West, the majority of the citizens of the U.S. have pushed the Indian into the stereotype of a drugstore wooden figure and romanticized him in story and song while ignoring the flesh and blood reality of the reservation inhabitant.
And today it is amazing to realize how little
any of us know about the minority our forefathers almost annihilated.
Although Haskell Institute has existed in Lawrence for 84 years and enrolls over 1,000 students, Lawrence citizens and KU students know relatively little about it or the Indian students who learn trades there. Moreover, the average American doesn't know major facts pertaining to the Indian as a citizen of the United States such as when the Indian first gained the right to vote.
The BIA elementary and high schools often ignore Indian culture and treat their students as "culturally deprived" children, according to an article in a 1964 American Journal of American Indian Education. Usually the quality of high school teaching is below average so that BIA graduates are not ready for college-level studies, says a Haskell official. And Wallace Galluzzi, superintendent of Haskell says that many Indian students are afraid to leave their friends and go to college.
The Kansas series, "the Forgotten Ones," brought out many of the problems the Indian faces, especially in education.
As a technical school, Haskell Institute offers the Indian student training for a practical job and a good job placement program. The rules of conduct imposed upon the Haskell student, such
as 10 p.m. weekend curfews for first year students seem preposterous for college-age students.
But, for many, Haskell is a good and solid opportunity for technical education, a type of education highly thought of in the Indian community.
But either praising or condemning Haskell alone is not the answer. It is clear that not all Indian students want a completely technical education. If their high school education and the protectorateship of the United States government restricts them to that singular choice, then America is failing the Indian.
The present handling if Indian education seems to limit the Indain to two choices: either accept job training or leave your cultural heritage to become a university student. And seemingly, now the Indian has littlesay in his education or that of his children.
America must remember the Indian—and the remembering must begin now.
The answer to the problem of either preserving a culture within a larger society or thereby being subject to its authority or of abandoning that culture and becoming assimilated into the larger culture hasn't been found yet. But we must begin to search for it.
Alison Steimel
Editorial Editor
John Marshall
Barbershop reactions
Last week quite a number of people who sit behind desks in Washington and New York and Los Angeles all got together and decided that the Chicago Police had "overreacted" to threats of violence from the student demonstrators in Chicago during the convention. It was called, for all practical purposes, the Walker Report to the National Commission of the Causes and Prevention of Violence.
The report was finally made public. And there were reactions from people on television for two days. People could sit and eat dinner and find out how they were supposed to feel about student protests in Chicago and how wrong the police were.
Saturday I went to a laundromat and a barber shop to find out how some of the other people felt about this report. I found out that Saturday was not a good day to talk about student protests.
THE BARBER SHOP
The barber stood there holding the long striped bib and asked me whether I wanted to read about Russia in the Mediterranean Sea or get my hair cut. Now October 14 was about the last time my hair had been cut; and it had been only a couple of weeks since I had read anything about the Russian Navy. So I got up and sat in the chair.
It was one of those chairs that always squeaks when you sit on the leather or vinyl, even though it has been warmed by the customer who sat there before you.
The razor at the back of my head was cold.
"Communists in Chicago behind the hippie protests. I sort of knew there was something else involved—something anti-American."
"Now that's terrible," the barber said. He was pointing his razor at my morning edition of the Kansas City Times.
"Yeah, terrible," I said.
He began cutting.
There was an obese lady sitting in the row of chairs that barber shops always have facing the big swivel chairs. She was busy, beating one of her sons and watching the other get his head shaved.
"None of my boys ever gonna look like those hippies I saw on the front page of the paper yesterday," she said. "And from KU too. In this very town. It's a disgrace."
"Students ought to spend more time studying. Not rioting." said the barber who had finished shaving her son's head. He was busy blowing the little hairs off his head with an air-hose.
"I'm a student and I don't riot," I said.
"I'm a student and I'm getting your hair cut," the fat lady said.
"Oh." She had smashed me back with an amazing power of rhetoric.
"The students didn't overreact. No," he said. "The police are always to blame. Always picking on the police. Always blaming somebody whose job is to protect the public."
Now if you think about it, you might "overreact" yourself—if someone threw a piece of (what they threw) at you, the barber with the hose had said.
The barber who was cutting my hair said he liked this country. He said that he had read what Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman had said and he didn't like the way they thought.
"Students nowadays think they don't have to have respect for anything—and they don't. They are the most skeptical and cynical people I've ever seen," he said. The barber said most students don't think anything is good in this country any more . . . except "love."
"Now, I'm not against love," the fat lady said. "But can you imagine one of those protesters going up to Eldrige Cleaver or James Hoffa or George Wallace and saying 'Peace'?"
Why that fat beatnik would be clubbed to death before he could draw his love beads.
The big lady and the two barbers said students do not appreciate anything any more. Not our government, which lets them get away with rioting and protesting and law-breaking; nor our police, who protect them so they will be able to protest against them. "And they even protest against their own classmates who are fighting for their country 10,000 miles away."
"Do you know what day it is?" I asked the fat lady who had another piece of Juicy Fruit in her mouth.
"Did anybody even bother to ask them if they liked what they were doing?" my barber asked. "Oh yeeah, they love it over there."
"Yes," she said. "It's Pearl Harbor Day— December seventh, just like all the other Pearl Harbor Days."
"Only this year it is worse," the other barber said.
It is worse, he said, because there were a lot of protests and demonstrations on Veterans' Day, and there will probably some today, too. "We don't like war or killing any better than the next person," the barber said, wiping the soap from my neck.
I got out of the chair and paid the barber. Yes, there would be a protest somewhere today.
Saturday was not a good day to protest to the barbers and the fat lady.
Drawing by John Carter
My God! How long has this elevator been between floors 7 and 8?
Letter to the Editor
Integrity so low?
On the contrary, Misses Buler, Phelps, and Snook, is personal integrity so low these days that an undesirable incident should be covered up merely because the offender is a football star?
The story's "allegations" were mild in comparison to what actually occurred. It is indeed a sad thing when someone has an ego so large that it can be gratified only by asserting physical superiority over a woman. We can only wonder that had
To the Editor:
any other student been the offender, would he have escaped suspension or legal suits to receive merely a mild hand-slap? It was not the "Kansan" article, but Riggins' behavior which is detrimental to the University, and to condone or vindicate such scandalous behavior involves nebulous reasoning at best. It is indeed a shame that people have such a hard time confining their hostilities to the football field.
Jo Ann Marinelli Wichita senior
A student newspaper serving the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas publishes at the University of Kansas daily during the academic year except holidays and examination periods. Mail subscription rates: $64 per month. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas. Accommodations, goods, services and employment offered to all students without regard to race or national origin. Opinions expressed are not necessarily based on University of Kansas or the State Board of Regents.
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